Deeplinks

Big media groups like the MPAA and the RIAA have historicallytargetedcollege campuses with “anti-piracy” measures, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — the blacklist bill they’re trying to push through Congress — is no exception. The bill’s supporters insist that it targets only “rogue” foreign sites dedicated to piracy, but its vague language and overbroad enforcement methods all but ensure it could be used to stifle student and educator speech.

The House Committee on Ways and Means will hold a hearing on the status and future negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Wednesday at 10:00 AM EST. The EFF has continually covered this secretive multi-nation trade agreement, which if passed, would export restrictive U.S. intellectual property laws across the globe.

TPP Watch, a New Zealand-based network of groups and individuals opposing the agreement, describes the agreement this way:

Last week, a federal district court judge in Oregon raised eyebrows when he rejected claims that a self-proclaimed Internet investigative journalist did not enjoy the protections of the state’s reporter’s shield law in a defamation lawsuit brought against her by Kevin Padrick, an Oregon attorney who was one of the targets of her online postings. Judge Marco A.

Representative Lamar Smith, the principal sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a dangerous and unconstitutional Internet blacklist bill now working its way through the House of Representatives, has released a “manager’s amendment” that reworks some of the bill’s worst provisions.While the new version jettisons some of the most harmful language, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The best thing about the new version is it no longer allows a private actor to effectively cut off payment processing for websites with a simple notice.The bill also endeavors to narrow the range of targets to non-U.S. sites.And, the authors have had the good sense to eliminate language that would have put sites under threat if even a single page was arguably linked to infringement.

Ever since the Internet has fought back against the the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), top supporters of the dangerous blacklist legislation have tried to mask its full consequences by misconstruing criticism and distorting the opposition’s position. On Saturday, former First Amendment lawyer and current representative of the MPAA and Director’s Guild, Floyd Abrams, wrote a disingenuous op-ed in the Washington Post that put all of Big Content’s misleading arguments and numerous strawmen in one place.

There has been a rolling scandal about the Carrier IQ software installed by cell phone companies on 150 million phones, mostly within the United States. Subjects of outrightdisagreement have included the nature of the program, what information it actually collects, and under what circumstances. This post will attempt to explain Carrier IQ's architecture, and why apparently conflicting statements about it are in some instances simultaneously correct. The information in this post has been synthesised from sources including Trevor Eckhart, Ashkan Soltani, Dan Rosenberg, and Carrier IQ itself.

First, when people talk about "Carrier IQ," they can be referring to several different things. For clarity, I will give them each a number. You can think of senses 2, 3 and 4 as being "layers" of code that are wrapped around each other.

a core software library that is written by Carrier IQ Inc. and which is present on all of the 150 million handsets;

a Carrier IQ application or program running on a phone, which includes the software in layer 2, but also additional porting code written by handset manufacturers (sometimes called "original equipment manufacturers" or "OEMs"), mobile network operators ("telcos"), or baseband chipset manufacturers;

the entire Carrier IQ stack, which includes the program described above as layer 3, but also often includes other code within a phone's Operating System and Baseband Processor OS to send data to layer 3. Like layer 3, this code is written by handset manufacturers, telcos or baseband manufacturers.1

On Thursday, prominent blogger and a leader of recent anti-corruption protests, Alexei Navalny was imprisoned for 15 days on charges of resisting the police. Navalny was one of hundreds arrested last week in recent widespread protests against political corruption and election fraud in the country. Navalny has been the leading voice in demanding social and political reform in Russia, spearheading an online campaign against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party for the past couple of years.